Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Actually more of a build-up to life in general, rather than narrowing up to consciousness.
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Can the known particles and interactions explain consciousness?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...particles/

KEY POINTS: At a fundamental level, a human being is made of only a small set of quantum particles, bound together through just four fundamental interactions to create all of known reality. That includes some phenomena that are incredibly complex, including those of consciousness, intelligence, and sentiency. How odd is it that these particles and forces fit together so precisely as to enable conscious beings like us to exist? It's a cutting-edge question, but one that we're closer than ever to answering definitively.

EXCERPT: If the laws of physics were so different that we couldn’t have come into existence, we never would have arisen to find these things out. Alas, we only have the one Universe, with the rules and limitations that it possesses, to study. Until we either find another, or discover precisely why and how our Universe has the rules and laws that it does, questions such as “Do the rules that our Universe plays by have a cause or a designer?” will firmly remain outside of the realm of science: beyond what it’s possible to know... (MORE - missing details)

(May 1, 2024 05:36 PM)C C Wrote: [ -> ]Actually more of a build-up to life in general, rather than narrowing up to consciousness.
- - - - - - - - - - - -

Can the known particles and interactions explain consciousness?
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...particles/

KEY POINTS: At a fundamental level, a human being is made of only a small set of quantum particles, bound together through just four fundamental interactions to create all of known reality. That includes some phenomena that are incredibly complex, including those of consciousness, intelligence, and sentiency. How odd is it that these particles and forces fit together so precisely as to enable conscious beings like us to exist? It's a cutting-edge question, but one that we're closer than ever to answering definitively.

EXCERPT: If the laws of physics were so different that we couldn’t have come into existence, we never would have arisen to find these things out. Alas, we only have the one Universe, with the rules and limitations that it possesses, to study. Until we either find another, or discover precisely why and how our Universe has the rules and laws that it does, questions such as “Do the rules that our Universe plays by have a cause or a designer?” will firmly remain outside of the realm of science: beyond what it’s possible to know... (MORE - missing details)

I don’t know how many bits of information make up the universe but it has to be an incredibly high number. How many bits in an atom, a life form, a universe? Seems like only an incredibly low amount of this information is required for consciousness to exist. Anything beyond consciousness?

Quote:How many bits in an atom, a life form, a universe?

"The information capacity of the universe has been a topic of great debate since the 1970s and continues to stimulate multiple branches of physics research. Here, we used Shannon’s information theory to estimate the amount of encoded information in all the visible matter in the universe. We achieved this by deriving a detailed formula estimating the total number of particles in the observable universe, known as the Eddington number, and by estimating the amount of information stored by each particle about itself. We determined that each particle in the observable universe contains 1,509 bits of information and there are ∼6 × 10 to the 80 bits of information stored in all the matter particles of the observable universe."----
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/adv/article/11/...ned-in-the